Consequence of a broken market - Is this the masked face of policing?
IF there’s one English-language idiom that’s long past its use-by date it’s the one about a picture being worth 1,000 words.
That was undoubtedly the case in 1911, when the saying was first recorded in advice given to journalists and publicity writers. It isn’t now, when everyone has a camera in their mobile phone, and when most of the photographs taken with them are worth, at a push, 10 words.
All the more striking, then, are the pictures of police and Take Back the City protesters after a Dublin eviction on Tuesday. The police — from the public order unit, also known as the Garda Riot Squad — are all but masked, as were the bailiffs who carried out the eviction ordered by the High Court.
On none of the officers shown in the photographs are their Garda identification numbers shown clearly or fully.
The Green Party’s justice spokesman has described the pictures as “quite disturbing”. That is quite an understatement; they are quite terrifying.
Change the colour of the uniforms, and it could be a picture of a militia in Crimea. But it is, we have to remind ourselves, the capital city of an advanced Western democracy in which politicians need little if any prompting to talk about the need for transparent and open policing.
In choosing to join the police force, officers know that they are putting themselves from to time in places of danger. There could in a protesting crowd be someone looking for the opportunity to bash a guard, so it’s right that acceptable safety precautions are taken.
The need for health and safety measures, however, must be weighed against an understanding of the psychological impact police clothing and appearance might have in a situation in which there might — or might not — be a risk of a breach of the peace, which appears to have been the Garda’s fear in Dublin on Tuesday.
Because such breaches did occur, with assaults on officers, the operation must be recorded as a failure for the masked men of the public order unit. They were there to police a spontaneous demonstration not by insurgents out to overthrow the elected government but by people justifiably angry about a housing crisis in a country in which there is a tsunami of mortgage arrears and soaring house and apartment rents while land hoarders and investment trusts find it profitable to sit on idle real estate.
The post-eviction disorder in Dublin was one ugly consequence of the crisis in a seriously skewed if not completely broken property market, as was the now torn-down encampment of tents on Cork’s St Patrick’s Quay.
Scenes such as these — policed by unidentifiable cops in paramilitary kit — in our cities aren’t good for tourism, but they will continue to disfigure our country and the lives of growing numbers of people until the Government gives up on what appears to be its philosophical attachment to the notion of housing as a mere commodity in a market at the mercy of financial interests. Its plan for a Land Development Agency with €1.25bn to build social and affordable homes is too little far too late.
